Recently, printing devices have been developed that are compact in size and easily transportable by a user from one location to another. These printing devices are often pre-configured by a user to operate with the user's computing device, typically a laptop computer or personal digital assistant (PDA). The user may easily bring these computing and printing devices to, for example, a business meeting in a conference room down the hall, or across the country. At the meeting, the user may conveniently use the printing device, for example, to print out a hard copy of a document stored on the user's computing device for other meeting attendees.
However, current printing devices suffer from the drawback that they may be unable to print documents from unfamiliar devices and networks, without complicated configuration of both the printing device and the unfamiliar device and network. A user may desire, for example, to use the printing device he/she brought to the meeting to print a document stored on one of the other meeting attendee's computing devices, a slide show stored on a projector device in the meeting room, or a document stored on a device connected to a local area network that services the meeting room. Unfortunately, current printing devices typically must be reconfigured by the user each time the user desires to connect the printing device to a new device, to a new network, or to a new location within a network. Thus, a user whose printing device has been configured to print documents from the user's laptop computer may have to inconveniently reconfigure the printing device in order to print a slide from a projector in a meeting room.
Using current printing technologies, the reconfiguration process may be complicated and time consuming. For example, if the user desires to print a slide from a projector connected to a wireless LAN in a meeting room, the user must configure the printing device to recognize the wireless LAN and projector, as well as configure the wireless LAN and projector to recognize the printing device. This may require that the user understand how to program the computing device, as well as how to program the network and/or interface to projector.
The user also may have to install specialized print driver software on, for example, the projector to enable it to send print jobs to the printing device. Manuals and software for this process may be difficult or impossible to locate. Even if such materials are available, the user may lack sufficient technical ability to complete the task, and may have to locate a system administrator, if available.
As a result, significant meeting time may be wasted while the user attempts the manual reconfiguration process. If too much time is wasted, the user may abandon the task entirely.